The present invention relates to an infant care apparatus and, more particularly, to an improved door latching mechanism for the doors of an infant incubator.
In the normal infant incubator, the construction generally includes an infant compartment within which the infant is positioned and which provides the infant with a controlled environment to aid in the well-being of the infant. That infant compartment must, of course, provide ready access to the infant to carry out various interventions that may be desired to assist the infant or to place the infant within the infant compartment or to remove the infant therefrom.
Accordingly, it is common for an infant incubator to have side walls and end walls surrounding the infant as well as a hood overhead of the infant in the formation of the infant compartment and also to include doors that can be opened and closed for the aforedescribed access to the infant contained within that infant compartment. The doors may also be of differing designs and constructions and may be a single door spanning between end walls as shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,569,080 of Dykes et al where the single side door is pivoted along a horizontal axis or, alternatively, there may be two doors in the form of “barn doors” that are pivoted along vertical axes at the external edges of the doors and which doors come together at about the middle of the incubator side when the doors are closed and the internal edges abut against each other or slightly overlap each other.
No matter the particular design of the doors as described, there is a need for a latching mechanism to allow the door or doors to be freely opened and closed where the doors must be positively and securely latched in the closed position to ensure the safety of the infant enclosed in the infant compartment. Thus, the free or non-pivoted internal edges must be securely latched to the hood in a positive manner that assures the caregiver of the integrity that the door is closed and will remain closed until deliberately unlatched by the caregiver in gaining access to the interior of the infant compartment.
One convenient latch for such purposes is that shown and described in the aforementioned U.S. Pat. No. 6,569,080 of Dykes et al where a vertically movable latch member is biased upwardly to engage into a recess affixed to the hood. While perfectly acceptable for the hood arrangement described in that patent, there are instances of other types of incubators where the use of a vertically movable latch member has some deficiencies.
For example, there are incubators that are designed to operate in a high humidity atmosphere within the infant compartment for lengthy periods of time, that is, for days or even weeks at a time. The presence of high humidity causes warpage of certain plastic materials used in incubators and that warpage moves the plastic materiel away from the area of high humidity in the direction toward the low humidity atmosphere. Accordingly, with certain incubators, the warpage moves the hood as well as doors outwardly with respect to the infant compartment, and if the movement is too extreme, the vertically movable latch member of the '080 patent will not engage the hood sufficiently and there is a problem that the caregiver will not be able to fully secure the door to the hood. As an example, the edge of an infant care apparatus hood may warp on the order of 0.2 to 0.3 inches over the course of two to four weeks of high humidity and therefore can raise real problems in the integrity of a latching mechanism used to latch a door to a hood.
The problem is even more pronounced where there are two doors, that is, the barn door design, along the side of the incubator and where those doors are pivotable along a vertical axis located at the outer edges of the doors such that the latching mechanism must allow the individual latching and unlatching of the inner abutting edges of the doors to the overhead hood while taking into account the possibility of warpage of either or both doors as well as the hood itself.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have an infant apparatus that includes a latching mechanism that ensures the positive latching between the door or doors of the apparatus even where there is warpage of the plastic material used in constructing the hood and the doors.